Game Details

When people talk about what makes a good open-world game, they usually talk about the freedom to do whatever they want. Of course, you can’t really do whatever you want in even the most forgiving open-world game. Your actions are limited not just by what the designers say is or isn’t possible, but by the virtual environment surrounding you—the world that’s being opened up. While it’s the “open” part that gets the most attention when discussing these games, more often than not it’s a strong, compelling world that separates the good open-world games from the bad ones.

Far Cry 3 is a case in point. The Rook Islands are probably the most enjoyable and richly detailed new video game environment since last year’s Arkham City. The islands are characters in themselves; a tropical paradise with everything from thick jungle and rolling hills to subterranean caves and undulating rivers. They feel like a place that has been around long before you got there, and one that will continue to grow and evolve long after you leave.

It’s a bit of a shame the islands often seem much more real than the people that inhabit them. You play as Jason Brody, an unassuming kid whose thrill-seeking vacation with his friends gets a bit too thrilling when they’re all captured by a group of pirates. Naturally, being pirates, they threaten to ransom you all before killing you or selling you into slavery. Through a mix of personal ingenuity and sheer craziness from the captors, Jason is the only one to escape the makeshift prison, quickly vowing to save his friends and get revenge on the pirates who put him in this position. He’s soon aided by a trope-standard Magical Negro character that gives him some mystical “tatau” (read: tattoos) that grant Jason some relatively unimpressive powers (more on those later).

But the tatau doesn’t really explain how Jason goes from worrying over never firing a gun before to becoming a blood-thirsty and effective mass murdering machine almost immediately. They also don’t explain how his mission quickly morphs from saving his friends and trying to escape with his life to casually accepting a destined role as the “chosen one” who will lead the island’s natives to freedom. Jason doesn't come across as a credible protagonist with believable motivations. Instead, he's a kind of mindless, standard action hero mold for wish-fulfilling players to pour themselves into.

The game does its best to weave in a sort of drug-induced, pseudo-psychological examination of Jason’s descent into madness, trying to force an unsupported identification between Jason and his aggressors at the same time. All this does is muddy an already messy and confusing narrative without providing a shred of explanation for many of the nonsensical things Jason does. It all culminates in one final storyline decision (the first meaningful one offered to the player in the entire game) that comes out of nowhere. This utterly fails at being the difficult moral conundrum it was obviously intended to be.

It’s a shame, because some of the individual characters do quite a lot with the weakly plotted material they’re given. Pirate leader Vaas easily steals every scene he’s in with his quick transitions between psychotic rambler and criminal mastermind. There’s a whole rogue’s gallery of interesting support characters brought to life by strong vocal and animated visual performances, but they seem to primarily exist to push you to your next mission while delivering some witty one-liners. The fact that these performances had to be wasted on a story with such little impact or apparent meaning is a real shame.

Luckily, the story doesn’t really get in the way of the free-form mayhem that makes up the bulk of Far Cry 3’s gameplay. Once again, the design of the island is key to the appeal, and the tight pacing keeps the game humming. Sure, there are plenty of missions in which you end up just plodding along against wave after wave of near-identical enemies, slowly working your way toward the next Macguffin in the storyline. But when you’re simply exploring the island, the map is dotted with so many fun things to do, it’s hard to avoid putting off your main goal for a series of quick, satisfying side-missions.

One moment you’re sneaking into an outpost, trying to take out its pirates without being seen. The next, you’re bouncing an ATV across the countryside to deliver supplies to some rebels. Then you’re fending off a bear attack and harvesting the pelt for a new key item in your inventory, or climbing a radio tower to open up a new section of the map (don’t ask me how that’s supposed to make sense). Next thing you know, you're jumping from that tower and soaring over the ground on a wingsuit, popping into a timed challenge to take out as many pirates as you can without dying. You move on to harvesting a patch of flowers for some power-boosting syringes. Then you're swimming to a nearby jetski and just gliding along the coast for a while. Finally, you try to remember what you were actually supposed to be doing in the first place.

Even more impressive, you can complete almost everything in the preceding paragraph without a single loading screen. Far Cry 3 seems to make it a point of pride to transition naturally from one sequence to another without pausing the game to load more content. There are some exceptions; the game takes a few seconds to load every time you die (which could be considered a fair punishment) and when you “fast travel” to a far off location. Still, you don’t realize just how much the frequent loading interruptions mar the flow of other games until you find them largely eliminated here.

The islands delicately straddle the fine line between "too empty" and "too crowded." Even when you’re just wandering around aimlessly, you’ll never go too long with running into a passing car with enemy pirates, or an abandoned relic to plunder for valuables, or a rocky outcropping just begging to be climbed. It’s all presented with a kind of naturalistic, organic care; it’s rare to see a repeated set-piece that just seems stamped in from some sort of pre-made designer’s template. Even those repeated radio towers you have to climb each have their own character and design to them.

The excellent environmental design feeds into the gameplay as well. Using the terrain to aid in stealth reconnaissance and for cover in a firefight becomes second nature. It’s rare to find a mission where you can’t use either or both, and the level designers have placed subtle set-pieces to aid either form of play. More than that, though, there’s just a smoothness to the interface and movement in Far Cry 3. Everything from your swimming speed to the firing of the upgradeable guns to the way each vehicles handles over different types of terrain just feels easy and uncomplicated. Things as simple as being able to see Jason's flailing arms and legs when falling from a great height increase the impression that you're really inhabiting his body and this world.

It doesn’t hurt that Far Cry 3 is at the absolute cutting edge of graphics technology. It’s a bit scary how real everything looks on my Velocity Micro rig, right down to the individual blades of long grass that sway gently in the wind. Complex effects like water, smoke and explosions are rendered beautifully. Distant pieces of the world come into view naturally, with no pop-in. The human figures are right on the verge of escaping the uncanny valley, with realistically watery eyes and amazingly natural movements. The Xbox 360 and PS3 versions do a passable job rendering the world, and you can get by with any computer that meets the (decently high) minimum specs. But this is one of those games that really shows off the extra money you spent on the newest computer hardware.

If there’s one major downside to the gameplay, it’s the feeling that your character is pre-baked, without much meaningful power progression throughout the story. More elaborate kills earn you more experience points, which work toward earning new tattoos that unlock new powers. But these powers are almost all just minor improvements from your base state. Things like quicker health regeneration and quieter sneaking are nice, but they felt like marginal improvements. Even new abilities like two-person takedowns and the ability to slide out of a sprint didn't make me feel like my death-dealing abilities had gotten much of an upgrade. By the end of the game, I didn’t feel that much more powerful than I did at the beginning.

The enemy artificial intelligence is also a low point. The waves and waves of pirates that come at you in many missions have a distressingly low sense of self-preservation, often charging your position at full speed, running out in the open just to be shot down easily. Other times they’ll stand there stupidly at point blank range, waiting for you to pivot around and kill them before they react. When the game wants to turn up the difficulty, it usually just throws more of these pirates at you, forcing you to find a new hiding spot before you’re overwhelmed.

These quibbles aren’t enough to ruin the experience of exploring one of the finest video game environments ever created, though. Far Cry 3 is the kind of world you'll want to come back to long after the forgettable story is over, just to see every corner of its painstakingly detailed environments and cross off all those enjoyable mission markers on that map.

The Good

One of the most detailed, enjoyable open-world environments ever conceived

Wide variety of missions and tasks to perform

Excellent physics modeling and interface

Top-of-the-line graphics (if your hardware can handle them)

Some strong vocal performances

The Bad

Nonsensical, easily forgettable storyline

Not much feeling of character progression

Enemy AI is often incredibly stupid

The Ugly

How much it costs to get a machine that can run the game on the highest graphics settings

Verdict: Buy it.

Kyle Orland
Kyle is the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica, specializing in video game hardware and software. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He is based in the Washington, DC area. Emailkyle.orland@arstechnica.com//Twitter@KyleOrl

I found the wildlife a bit annoying. I'm trying to sneak through the bush to stealthy take out some pirates and I get attacked by every damn beast the island can throw at me. It breaks up the actual game play too much.

Oddly enough RPS review actually said that the feeling of power progression is spot on, with you feeling more and more powerful with experience but not overpowered.In any case, I will definitely be picking this up - I've been jonesing for an awesome FPS with deep and rewarding gameplay.

I actually like that the skill point upgrades have only a minor amount of power creep, unlocking minor upgrades rather than game-changing abilities.

The biggest problem in Dead Island (which uses the same engine EDIT: perhaps not but sure feels like it) that I found was that everything being level-driven meant that 2 or 3 levels of difference was enough to make the game un-fun in how much damage you took and dealt. This zombie looks like every other zombie but is level 13 instead of level 10 so I have to hack away at it for ages, damaging my weapon significantly. Combine that with the repair costs getting fully out of hand making me scared to use effective weapons because I can only just afford to repair them afterwards and I really felt punished for exploring and punished for advancing.

In Far Cry 3 the firearms are deadly, all the time, from the moment you pick them up. There are no levels differentiating how hard something is to kill vs your current power level. Certain enemy types aside (the armoured guys, and wildlife) there is nothing that will survive a burst to the body or a carefully taken headshot. I like this.

The stealth dynamic is pretty fluid and workable. The takedown system is probably the thing that feels most forced about it, the unlock that allows you to chain them together is the most game-changing of the skill upgrades I've seen so far (I haven't unlocked all the trees yet, though).

The skill unlocks make your gameplay easier (slide to cover, move faster while crouched, reload faster, swim faster, and so forth) but mostly they don't give you "new powers" that are unbalanced.

I'm enjoying it, even if the story line attempts to push a feeling of urgency into your actions while at the same time giving you no penalty for not chasing it as your primary focus.

You can tell Ubi also publishes Assassin's creed : the radio towers mimics AC II's behavior : you climb them to reveal the map around. Mini side mission also work the exact same way (assassination, delivery, etc...).Takedown is also very similar to one shot blade assassination skills of Ezio, only with less variations

Unfortunately, it still sounds like I would have more fun playing Just Cause 2 and it's storyline is the very definition of non-existent.

I always forget that JC2 actually has a story until I happen to get near my next few available story missions when dinking around. I've been playing this game about 1-2 hours a week for the last year, just exploring the map and taking over bases.zones, and I still haven't seen the whole thing yet

Do they have any retarded mechanics like "remember to take your malaria pills regularly or you go dizzy and eventually die"?

No. It's a fairly standard health system. 2-6 health bars, losing one means you need to heal up while a half-lost bar means it'll regenerate. There are no diseases that you can get, as far as I can tell (and I've been bitten by rabid dogs in-game).

Also, this game executes everything better than Just Cause 2, I find. Well, you can't hookshot from flying vehicle to flying vehicle, but yeah.

I can't believe you guys criticised the AI as being 'stupid'. I think the AI in this game is some of the best I have ever played against. The pirates are easily fooled by stones, but at least on hard difficulty they pose a challenge. The character progression wasn't enormous, but this isn't Skyrim, it's Far Cry, and Jason progressed appropriately.

The story wasn't the greatest ever, but I think it was appropriate for the setting and it allowed the developers to create a world where the protagonist's actions throughout the world (recapturing settlements etc) had meaning with relation to the story, without breaking it.

After what they did with FarCry 2, I'm not touching this with a pole. And I don't think I'll be missing anything worthwhile.

Strange, I actually liked Far Cry 2 more than the first game. Maybe because not a lot of games are set in a rendition of Africa that actually feels authentic. I won't be touching this purely because of the uplay crap that Ubisoft keep forcing onto the customer. I barely put up with Steam as is.

Been playing for a few hours now and it feels too much like AC3. Basic game dynamic, the story kinda feels the same and beautiful surroundings. Even though the story is much better in AC3 it shares some of FC3's flaws.

The only thing different that really bothers me is climbing. Jason can't climb and sometimes it feels like you're running up a mountain like f***ing Sisyphus.

I think I'm the only one that loved Far Cry I & II. Can't wait to try this one out. While I loved Far Cry II and it's setting in Africa, I think tropical islands will always be my favorite location so I'm stocked it's back.

I'm sorry to burst your bubble but I live in the Caribbean and the vegetation here does not look like that at all. In fact, every plant looks in that game looks so healthy to the point of having a plasticky feel and the environment is too squeaky-clean.

If FarCry 2 left a bad taste in your mouth, FarCry 3 is a smorgasbord of deliciousness.

Gun play is solid, no more breaking after 3 rounds, the weapons themselves have heft and feel solid (in the game), theres a nice variety, pistols, smgs, shotguns, assault rifles, sniper rifles, launchers. Some weapons can get attachments (suppressor on a sniper rifle == fun), others just bling in the form of paintjobs. There are also custom weapons that unlock along the way, including a Tabor smg with a hot red paint job, extended mags, suppressor and red dot sight (that just shreds things).

Then theres the bow - silent, deadly, precise... once you learn to respect gravity and arc your shots. Then you find you can make fire arrows, and better yet, ASPLOSION!!!(tm) arrows. So you can go from being mr friggin ninja, stalking your prey and dropping them clean, to `aw screw it, BOOOOOM` when things go south.

Theres shit to do, running packages, hang gliding, exploring - there are caves, under water areas, ruins deep in the trees, japanese ww2 emplacements (and crashed planes), climbing radio towers to unlock map view, ziplines here and there, secret items to find, enemy `points` to attack and take control of, random patrols to ambush, c4 / landmines - but sadly I couldnt make the C4 stick to cars reliably so dreams of bailout out of a rolling bomb took a back seat. Even attacking those points is varied (and unlock farcry2 no insta respawns), do you case it at range, do you start popping heads with that sniper rifle, do you sneak in and do it up close and personal with just the knife, do you sneak in drop c4 at all the alarm points, run out, lob a molotov over the wall back into the base and when people run for the alarms *click*,

In summary, its like the first Far Cry with a solid dose of Just Cause 2 and just a hint of Crysis.

I don't care how much it costs to run the game on its highest settings, I'm more interested in what the lowest playable option is like. Maybe you should consider reviewing games on a piece of junk machine like mine.

Been playing this a bit and the environments are great, good solid gun play, good movement mechanics (including driving but not climbing). I love the fire mechanics, using a flamethrower/fire arrow/Molotov has become a go to option for me (and the thatch huts burn nicely). Sure the AI can be a bit silly - though I do love setting pirates on fire and watching them run around setting their friends (and local environments) on fire.

Myself and my wife did have a good laugh that the villagers/tribespeople are all Maori however (except the high priestess). The accent (which I hear every day - including certain turns of phrase), use of the lingo (Kia Ora, Ka Kite), the use of the moko (facial tattoo) and there's even a snippet of a haka thrown into one section of the game. I've gotta say that they're generally (and I'm far from being any sort of expert) pretty authentic to my experiences (at least linguistically).

I'm sorry to burst your bubble but I live in the Caribbean and the vegetation here does not look like that at all. In fact, every plant looks in that game looks so healthy to the point of having a plasticky feel and the environment is too squeaky-clean.

I was vaguely interested in this game because there was talk of a co-op mode. After reading the article, I still have no idea if there is co-op or even the ubiquitous team deathmatch. I don't expect reviews of every game released, but I would hope that any reviews would have the usual Ars Technica depth.

I too am finding the skills progression to be well balanced. Most the upgrades I've picked so far have been useful, but not godly, or have gotten me to the next one that is useful. None of them so far has made me think "now I'm finally set", which means I keep on pushing for the next one.

"You play as Jason Brody, an unassuming kid.."Does unassuming mean bratty, obnoxious and loud?One of my least favourite characters to play so far.

Mostly a pretty good game.I've been attacked by wildlife while sneaking up on pirates like a poster above, but not very often, so it's never been much of a hassle. It's just made me look where I'm going.

Overall I agree with the gist of the review, good game with a weak story.

I've not got far in the story, but I actually think the protagonist is a much more 'real' character than 99% of FPS games where you play a mute badass with no defining characteristics except a million-to-one k/d ratio.

Jason is a spoilt, selfish rich kid who got in way over his head. Maybe it all goes stupid in the end, but I'm liking his steady progression into a more responsible adult.

I also like the skill unlocks. It's an FPS, not an RPG. The unlocks are generally useful and give a noticable boost. You're going from a scared kid with a gun to a hardened freedom fighter with more guns - not a level 1 orphan boy to a level 50 dragonmaster.

While I'm not all that far in, this review seems spot on. Three important points not mentioned, though:

1. The protagonist and his friends are pretty much the most annoying characters ever created by humankind. I instantly hated them all so much that I found myself rooting for the "pirates". I felt an overpowering urge to walk up to the nearest pirate screaming "just shoot me now, please, for the sake of humanity!". If there are really any young people like this in California (where they are supposedly from), I say we devote the entire world's combined nuclear arsenal to reducing the state to a smoldering crater. Yeah there would be a lot of very unfortunate collateral damage, but it would be worth it to be sure.

2. Where exactly is this island? I mean, drug cartels and kidnappings (Central America?), WWII Japanese fortifications and tigers (Asia?), New Zealand accents and Maori inspired tattoos (Oceania?), Jamaican music on the radio and a "mystical negro" with a Caribbean accent, etc., etc.. I get that it's fiction, but it does kind of break the immersion when the game designers couldn't even pick a continent.

3. It's a REALLY easy game. If you have ever played an FPS before, even if only once, you want to play on hard mode. If you are good at shooters (I'm not) you probably just want to give the game a miss.

...all that said, there is still a lot of fun to be had.

GG42 wrote:

I think I'm the only one that loved Far Cry I & II. Can't wait to try this one out. While I loved Far Cry II and it's setting in Africa, I think tropical islands will always be my favorite location so I'm stocked it's back.

I not only loved Far Cry, I adored the damn thing. It utterly blew my mind at the time. So you are not alone in that regard. I also liked its sequel. I believe it was called "Crysis". I'm not entirely sure what either of those great games have to do with Far Cry 2 or Far Cry 3, however.

I think the root of it for me is that where they had a choice to make it fun or "logical" they mostly chose fun. The radio towers dont really make sense but as a gameplay mechanic they are fun. I think this approach makes the story the weakest part as the highlight is the world where the devs have generally tried to strip back the game to "is this fun or not?"

Overall I am enjoying it most when the unexpected things happen - where i had scoped out a camp, marked all the guys and about to start my attack, only for a tiger to walk into the camp and start attacking the pirates which subsequently caused a massive explosion as the pirates tried to kill the tiger... made the camp assault a lot easier but was fun to have this changing environment